Affinity Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Q: Should I read Affinity or Fingersmith first?

Most readers who have done both recommend Fingersmith first, and it is rated higher. Affinity is the better choice if you want something under 400 pages, or if the con-artist machinery interests you more than the romance does.

Updated on October 8, 2026

Verdict: The bleakest and most tightly built of Sarah Waters’s Victorian novels — a prison-visiting spiritualist ghost story that turns out to be a con — undercut for romance readers by the fact that the love story is the trap rather than the reward.

Best for: Readers who want Gothic dread and a genuinely devastating reversal, and who can accept a novel that punishes the woman it made you care about.

Heat level: ★★☆☆☆ (1.5/5 — longing rather than sex; romance.io lists it with no steam band assigned)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.8/5 — a 3.75 Goodreads average across 29,471 ratings, with a twist that divides readers far more than the prose does)

Tropes: Victorian Gothic, spiritualism, prison setting, dual diary narration, unreliable narrator, obsession, class difference, grief, forbidden love, no HEA.

Affinity by Sarah Waters is a standalone 1999 novel and her second book — Gothic literary fiction rather than historical lesbian romance — in which Margaret Prior, a grieving upper-class spinster recovering from a suicide attempt, begins visiting the women’s wards of Millbank Prison and fixes on Selina Dawes, a young spiritualist imprisoned after a séance ended in assault and death.

It holds a 3.75 average across 29,471 Goodreads ratings and 3.72 on StoryGraph, it won the Somerset Maugham Award and the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award, and its reviews split on exactly one thing: whether the ending is the finest piece of construction Waters has ever managed or a trick played at the reader’s expense. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is Affinity About?

This is 1870s London, and specifically two of its most airless institutions: Millbank Prison, a pentagonal warren of stone cells built to be inescapable, and the respectable upper-middle-class household, which the novel treats as the more effective of the two. Margaret is unmarried, thirty, mourning her father, watched by her mother, and expected to be a companion for the rest of her life. Visiting prisoners is the one activity that gets her out of the house, which is the joke the book never says out loud.

Selina Dawes is what she finds there. A medium who claims her spirit control did the damage, she is serene, evasive and entirely aware of what she is doing to the woman on the other side of the bars. The novel runs on two diaries — Margaret’s, kept as she visits, and Selina’s, kept in the years before her arrest — so you read the seduction and its groundwork at the same time without being able to line them up. That gap is the whole design.

What Makes This Victorian Gothic Work

Millbank: The prison is the most-praised element by a distance. Readers describe the stone, the cold and the smell as physically oppressive, and the visiting scenes are the passages people quote back.
The construction: Kirkus called it another stunning performance and said the ending grates exquisitely on the nerves right up to its climax. Readers who reread report finding the machinery in plain sight the second time.
The diary structure: Two voices, two timelines, one of them lying — and the book never has to announce which.
Margaret’s grief: The laudanum, the suicide attempt, the flatness of a life with no exits. A number of readers say this is the most accurate depiction of depression they have found in a Victorian pastiche.
It is short: At around 350 pages this is the most accessible way into Waters, and the Lesbrary recommends it on exactly that basis for readers who cannot face the length of Fingersmith.

Book Synopsis

Margaret Prior is not recovering. Her father is dead, the man she loved is married to her sister, and the laudanum her mother doses her with each night is the closest thing she has to a plan. Becoming a Lady Visitor at Millbank Prison is her doctor’s idea of an occupation, and for a while it is one: she walks the wards, notes down the cases, and hands out the small kindnesses a woman of her class is permitted to hand out.

Then she reaches the cell of Selina Dawes. Selina was a working spiritualist, a medium with a following and a wealthy patroness, until a séance ended with the patroness dead and a girl badly hurt. Selina says a spirit called Peter Quick was responsible. The court disagreed. In her cell she is calm, she knows things about Margaret she should not know, and she says the two of them are affinities — two halves of one thing, kept apart by an accident of circumstance.

Margaret comes back. She comes back again. Flowers appear in her locked bedroom and locks of hair arrive that nobody could have delivered, and the visits become the only hours of her week that are alive. Interleaved with all of this is Selina’s own diary from the years before Millbank — the séances, the sitters, the patroness, and a household arrangement that the reader can see and Margaret cannot. What Selina wants, and whether wanting it and loving Margaret are the same thing, is the question the book spends three hundred pages refusing to answer.

My Review

This is the most efficient book Sarah Waters has written, and I mean that as high praise. Tipping the Velvet sprawls and Fingersmith doubles back on itself for six hundred pages; Affinity is three hundred and fifty pages that do exactly one thing and do it without a wasted scene. Every visit to Millbank tightens the same screw, and the two diaries are laid against each other so precisely that the reveal, when it lands, does not feel like a twist at all — it feels like a door you walked past four times.

Millbank itself is the other genuine achievement. Waters is writing a real prison with a real architecture, and the cold, the stone corridors, the matrons and the classification system are researched to the point where the visiting scenes become physically unpleasant to read. Around it sits the other prison — Margaret’s mother’s drawing room, the laudanum at bedtime, the sister’s wedding, the future as a permanent companion — and the book is completely clear-eyed that these are the same structure with better furniture.

Where it struggles is the first half, and this is the dominant complaint rather than my impatience. Multiple reviewers describe the opening as sluggish, and the shape of the objection is consistent: the visits repeat, Margaret circles, and roughly a hundred and fifty pages pass before the book seems to start. StoryGraph’s readers call it medium-paced and the did-not-finish rate is a low 3%, so the people who push through mostly stay — but the ones who bounce, bounce early. Margaret divides readers just as hard. She is described as tiresome, self-pitying and weak by about as many reviewers as describe her as the most sympathetic depiction of depression they have read, and which camp you land in decides the book.

One expectation to reset, and for this site’s readers it is the important one. Affinity is not a romance and it is not even a tragic romance in the usual sense. Without spoiling the mechanism: the pairing that survives the final pages is not the pairing you have been reading for, Margaret’s last diary entry reads as a suicide note, and the emotional register at the close is betrayal rather than grief. Amazon files the book under Occult Suspense and Horror rather than anything queer or romantic, and that shelving is a better guide to the experience than the cover copy. If you came from Fingersmith for the double-cross, you will get one. If you came for two women who end up together, do not start here.

My honest note: A near-perfect Gothic and a cruel book, and it is cruel on purpose. If you read for construction and dread, this is the tightest thing Waters has built. If you need the woman you followed for three hundred pages to be rewarded rather than used, it will feel like a betrayal — which is exactly what it is designed to feel like.

Element	In Affinity
Central relationship	Margaret Prior & Selina Dawes — a grieving lady visitor and the imprisoned medium who tells her they are two halves of one soul
Core tropes	Victorian Gothic, spiritualism, prison setting, dual diary narration, unreliable narrator, obsession, class difference
Setting	London, 1874 — Millbank Prison’s women’s wards and a Chelsea drawing room, both of them locked
Heat level	1.5/5 — longing, not sex; romance.io lists it with no steam band assigned
Series	Standalone — no series and no sequel; the plot resolves completely
Content notes	Suicide and attempted suicide, suicidal ideation, forced institutionalisation and confinement, laudanum addiction and drug use, mental illness, grief and parental death, gaslighting, classism, lesbophobia

How Explicit Is Affinity?

A 1.5 out of 5, which makes this the least explicit of Waters’s Victorian novels by a wide margin. romance.io lists Affinity on Sarah Waters’s author page but assigns it no steam level at all — the adult-romance database does not classify it as romance — so the number here comes from Amazon’s 18-and-up rating and from what readers report, which is that the charge is almost entirely psychological. What physical contact there is happens through prison bars or in the dark, and critics who have written about the book specifically contrast it with Tipping the Velvet‘s detailed and passionate sex: Affinity is a novel about wanting, not about having.

The content that actually needs flagging is not the sex. StoryGraph’s readers put confinement, suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts, forced institutionalisation and drug use at the top of the graphic list, and the laudanum and the suicide material run through the whole book rather than sitting in one scene. If you want restrained historical intensity elsewhere, Cantoras and The Night Watch sit in a similar band.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you read for atmosphere and construction, you want a Gothic that earns its dread rather than announcing it, you like an unreliable narrator you only recognise in hindsight, and you do not need anyone to be happy at the end.

You may want to skip it if: you need an HEA, you lose patience with a slow first hundred and fifty pages, you will resent a narrator other readers call self-pitying, or suicide and institutionalisation are subjects you do not want sustained across a whole novel.

In short: the tightest Gothic Waters has written, and the one that treats its heroine worst.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

Twenty-seven years on, Affinity has settled into a specific place in the Waters catalogue: it is the one people arrive at second or third, and the one whose defenders are the most emphatic. The awards give it real standing — the Somerset Maugham Award, a Lambda Literary Award finalist place in Lesbian Fiction, and the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award in 2001 — and there is a 2008 ITV adaptation, ninety minutes with Anna Madeley as Margaret and Zoë Tapper as Selina, adapted by Andrew Davies, that keeps bringing new readers to the book. What I could not find is much sapphic-blog coverage: the Lesbrary has a review, but The Lesbian Review, LezReviewBooks, Bookish Sapphic and Autostraddle all appear to have skipped it, and The Lesbian Review’s own best-of list picks Fingersmith and not this. That is its own quiet evidence about which Waters novel gets pressed into people’s hands.

The audiobook is narrated by Juanita McMahon — the same narrator who reads The Night Watch — across just over fifteen hours.

Prefer audio? Listen to Affinity on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The atmosphere, first and most consistently — Millbank, the cold, the sense of a building designed to make people smaller. Then the ending, which admirers describe in almost identical terms: devastating, brilliant, a door that was open the whole time. The diary structure gets specific praise for making the reader complicit rather than clever. And a real constituency defends Margaret exactly as hard as her critics attack her, describing the depression, the laudanum and the family’s management of her as the most honest thing in the book.

What readers argue about and complain about: The first half, above everything. The complaint is consistent and quantified in the reviews as roughly the first hundred and fifty pages, where the visits repeat and the plot appears not to move; the 3% did-not-finish rate on StoryGraph is low, which suggests the ones who stay are glad they did. Second: Margaret herself, who is called tiresome and self-pitying by about as many reviewers as call her sympathetic — an unusually even split, and the clearest predictor of how you will rate the book. Third, and more heated: the twist. Most readers report devastation rather than anger, but a real minority calls it manipulative and says it stretches credulity, and that objection is worth knowing about because it is not a stupid one — the book withholds a great deal to make it work. Fourth, a smaller thread: some readers find the mental-illness material underdeveloped or melodramatic, though others praise it for exactly the reticence the period would have imposed.

The standalone question worth asking first: this is a standalone, it resolves completely, and there is nothing to wait for — no sequel, no series, no ambiguity about what happened. The question is which Waters to read next rather than what comes after this one. Readers who want the same machinery with a much bigger payoff go to Fingersmith, which is the higher-rated book and the one most people recommend first. Readers who want the queer London without the cruelty go to Tipping the Velvet. This one is the shortest and the coldest, and it is a better first Waters than its reputation suggests precisely because it does not ask for a six-hundred-page commitment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Affinity have a happy ending?

No, and it is worth being blunt about it: the ending is bleak even by Sarah Waters’s standards. Margaret and Selina do not end up together, the final diary entry reads as a suicide note, and the dominant emotion at the close is betrayal rather than loss.

Is Affinity a romance novel?

No. It is Gothic literary fiction with a central obsession between two women, not a genre romance. Amazon files it under Occult Suspense and Horror rather than romance or LGBTQ+ fiction, which is a fair description of how it reads.

How explicit is Affinity?

A 1.5 out of 5 — the least explicit of Waters’s Victorian novels. The charge is psychological rather than physical, and romance.io lists the book without assigning it a steam level at all.

Should I read Affinity or Fingersmith first?

Most readers who have done both recommend Fingersmith first, and it is rated higher. Affinity is the better choice if you want something under 400 pages, or if the con-artist machinery interests you more than the romance does.

Is there an audiobook of Affinity?

Yes — narrated by Juanita McMahon, running about 15 hours. She also narrates The Night Watch, and the diary structure suits audio well because the two voices are unmistakable.

If You Loved Affinity, Read These Next

The obvious next step is Fingersmith, which runs the same con-and-confinement machinery at twice the length and with a far more generous ending. For the same Gothic dread in a cursed girls’ school with a modern frame, Plain Bad Heroines is the closest contemporary match. And if what held you was a queer woman trapped by an institution rather than by a person, The Night Watch takes the same interest into wartime London.

For more in this register, browse our books like Fingersmith guide, the historical sapphic romance reading list, or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

Affinity is the most controlled thing Sarah Waters has written and the least forgiving. Millbank is a genuinely oppressive setting, the twin diaries are built with real precision, and the final reversal is the kind that sends people straight back to page one. It is also slow to start, narrated by a woman half its readers cannot stand, and constructed so that the reader’s investment is the thing being exploited. Whether that trade is worth it depends on whether you read Gothic for the dread or for the rescue — but at 350 pages it is the cheapest way to find out whether Waters is for you. Check Affinity on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Affinity ranks as first-rate Victorian Gothic with a queer centre — tightly built and genuinely chilling, held back for this audience by an ending that treats its heroine as a mark, and best approached for the prison and the construction rather than for the love story.